How
to listen to old records in the 21st century
College Park, MD (April 16, 2004)--At the upcoming Acoustical Society
of America meeting in New York City this May, Carl Haber and Vitaliy
Fadeyev of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, and their
colleagues will present a non-destructive, non-contact method for digitizing
old mechanical recordings such as 78 RPM shellac discs and Edison cylinders.
To tackle the problem of preserving old technology, the researchers
have applied a late 20th century solution to the problem: they use optical
methods. Using optical methods and digital image processing, they measure
the undulations in the grooves of the record to obtain audio information.
The researchers hope the technique can allow archivists to recover old
records and cylinders without using a needle (more
information).
The conference is the 75th anniversary of the Acoustical Society of
America, the largest acoustics association in the United States. Back
in 1929, when the society was born, 78 RPM records were king. The conference
takes place from May 24-28, 2004 in midtown Manhattan.
Also at the same meeting session where the new technique will be discussed,
Patrick J. Wolfe of the University of Cambridge in England will present
state-of-the-art methods for restoring degraded audio, while Jonathan
Berger of Stanford University will unveil a novel two-step process for
removing noise in recorded music. Masataka Goto of the National Institute
of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan will discuss the
SmartMusicKIOSK, a music-store CD-listening station that automatically
finds the chorus section and other key parts of a song so that a user
could jump to these sections without having to search for them with a
fast-forward button.
Meeting abstract:
2pMU4.
Reconstruction of mechanically recorded sound by image processing
Other abstracts at the meeting session:
Paper
2pMU1. Retrieving the sources in historical sound recordings
2pMU2.
An overview of statistical-model-based techniques for audio restoration
2pMU3.
A two-stage approach to removing noise from recorded music
2pMU5.
Source identification and manipulation in stereo music recordings using
frequency-domain signal processing
2pMU6.
SmartMusicKIOSK: Music-playback interface based on chorus-section detection
method
2pMU7.
Music processing above and below the fundamental frequency
More information
Carl Haber
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Masataka Goto
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Ben Stein
American Institute of Physics
301-209-3091
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